Applications of the MACBETH Approach in the Framework of an Additive Aggregation Model

In measurement theory terminology, MACBETH is an interactive approach for mapping into a real scale the various degrees to which the elements of a finite set possess a property P. The originality of MACBETH's questioning procedure is the possibility of establishing a constructive path towards cardinal measurement in both quantitative and substantive meaningful terms, avoiding the operational problems recognized as a weakness of other procedures. The use of the notion of semantic absolute judgements plays a key role here and the simplicity, interactivity and constructiveness of our approach insert it in the modern paradigms of decision aid. This article illustrates the usefulness of MACBETH as a tool to facilitate decision support, by describing its application in two real public decision situations where we acted as facilitators. Although the cases correspond to quite different decision contexts and problematics and our interventions have addressed diverse issues, they have in common the fact that we conducted both evaluation processes in the framework of an additive multicriteria aggregation procedure. In the first case MACBETH has been used to support the construction of (local) cardinal value functions, while the second illustrates how our approach can serve as a weighting procedure to determine the scaling constants of an additive aggregation model. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.